Potential cancer treatments often come from unexpected sources, like plants, artificial sweeteners and industrial solvents. Now, tests have shown that a type of molecule originally derived from sea snail eggs has performed surprisingly well in destroying cancer cells, particularly those that have become resistant to other treatments.

A wide range of blood cancers and solid tumors, including breast, ovarian, pancreatic and lower gastrointestinal cancers, can develop a resistance to chemotherapy drugs over time. This multidrug-resistance can severely limit treatment options and increase the chances of relapse.

Falling oxygen levels caused by global warming could be a greater threat to the survival of life on planet Earth than flooding, according to researchers from the University of Leicester published in Bulletin of Mathematical Biology.

A study led by Sergei Petrovskii, Professor in Applied Mathematics from the University of Leicester’s Department of Mathematics, has shown that an increase in the water temperature of the world’s oceans of around six degrees Celsius – which some scientists predict could occur as soon as 2100 – could stop oxygen production by phytoplankton by disrupting the process of photosynthesis.

“Global warming has been a focus of attention of science and politics for about two decades now,” Professor Petrovskii explained. “A lot has been said about its expected disastrous consequences; perhaps the most notorious is the global flooding that may result from melting of Antarctic ice if the warming exceeds a few degrees compared to the pre-industrial level. However, it now appears that this is probably not the biggest danger that the warming can cause to the humanity.”

“About two-thirds of the planet’s total atmospheric oxygen is produced by ocean phytoplankton – and therefore cessation would result in the depletion of atmospheric oxygen on a global scale,” he added. “This would likely result in the mass mortality of animals and humans.”

The team developed a new model of oxygen production in the ocean that takes into account basic interactions in the plankton community, such as oxygen production in photosynthesis, oxygen consumption because of plankton breathing and zooplankton feeding on phytoplankton.

While mainstream research often focuses on the CO2 cycle, as carbon dioxide is the agent mainly responsible for global warming, few researchers have explored the effects of global warming on oxygen production.

And "they" continue to use the wrong terminology—very anthropocentric, very short-sighted—regarding "global warming" as a statistics that shows the "Global" but hides the Essentials—like a bikini. What we are facing is not a statistical increase in "median average temperature" but the effects of extreme weather as the complex climate system swings wider and wider. This is Climate Change, not "global warming." But thus the misnomer continues, and those who oppose it have all the right to say: "Global Warming? Really?" It is the extremes that will cause the destruction, not the "average" as a "triangulation" based on a single point of reference.

Scientists at the Stanford University School of Medicine have developed a new procedure that uses modified messenger RNA to quickly and efficiently increase the length of human telomeres, the protective caps on the ends of chromosomes that are associated with aging and disease.

Treated cells behave as if they are much younger than untreated cells, multiplying with abandon in the laboratory dish rather than stagnating or dying. Skin cells with telomeres lengthened by the procedure were able to divide up to 40 more times than untreated cells.

A German company has the attention of the electric vehicle industry and those watching it, having recently documented remarkable claims for its KOLIBRI lithium-metal-polymer battery.

DBM Energy told GM-Volt.com that its design could wind up costing less than the types of batteries used in the Chevrolet Volt, the Nissan LEAF, and other EVs while radically exceeding all meaningful performance criteria.

We’re talking potential for reasonably priced electric cars that could travel 300-400 miles on a charge, and be replenished in minutes...

As the article says, a battery like this "would mean the future is practically now – not years from now – with safe and durable batteries threatening to relegate petrol cars to merely optional status."

I think MJ has been compromised by the Right. It's not just this article, which leaves out any counter-vailing and expert opinion (other than a few easy lobs by the reporter), it's their regular interviews of Libertarian/conservatives and general ignoring of progressive counter-opinions. The thinking, I suppose, is that we are "already supposed to know the other side" but as this article shows, that is not always the case. There are literally hundreds of studies that show definite harm from transgenic foods, and growing epidemiological evidence (not to mention growing waistlines, which some attribute to the indigestability of GMO food, leading to the need to consume more and more to be able to extract meaningful amount of nutrients, not just calories) that cancer and allergies are clustering wherever GMOs are in great use. The developing world, which still does not have the widespread use of GMOs, doesn't have anywhere near our level of allergies; things like peanut allergies are virtually unheard of. Maybe Monsanto will succeed in getting the whole world to use their GMOs, and then, if anyone is still around to do honest research, we'll see their levels of disease rise to meet the West's.BTW, who is paying Dr. Novella? Who is paying Mother Jones?

Today's plastics are made from petroleum, which means we are polluting the atmosphere and putting products that cannot biodegrade into our environment. But Zeoform, a new company based in Australia has created a new kind of plastic made only from water and cellulose taken from hemp plants -- meaning the plastic is not only eco-friendly but biodegradable.

The company's patented process converts the cellulose fibers found in hemp into a super-strong, high tech molding material capable of being formed into 100 percent nontoxic and biodegradable products...

The company says their product relies only upon the natural process of hydrogen bonding that takes place when cellulose fibers are mixed with water. No glue or other bonding material is necessary, because the bond already created is so strong.

The final material can be turned into almost anything, and can be cut, routed, machined, drilled, screwed, nailed and glued in the same way wood can be.

By attaching a cancer-killer protein to white blood cells, Cornell biomedical engineers have demonstrated the annihilation of metastasizing cancer cells traveling throughout the bloodstream.

The study, “TRAIL-Coated Leukocytes that Kill Cancer Cells in the Circulation,” was published online the week of Jan. 6 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“These circulating cancer cells are doomed,” said Michael King, Cornell professor of biomedical engineering and the study’s senior author. “About 90 percent of cancer deaths are related to metastases, but now we’ve found a way to dispatch an army of killer white blood cells that cause apoptosis – the cancer cell’s own death – obliterating them from the bloodstream. When surrounded by these guys, it becomes nearly impossible for the cancer cell to escape.”

King and his colleagues injected human blood samples, and later mice, with two proteins: E-selectin (an adhesive) and TRAIL (Tumor Necrosis Factor Related Apoptosis-Inducing Ligand). The TRAIL protein joined together with the E-selectin protein stick to leukocytes – white blood cells – ubiquitous in the bloodstream. When a cancer cell comes into contact with TRAIL, which becomes unavoidable in the chaotic blood flow, the cancer cell essentially kills itself.

“The mechanism is surprising and unexpected in that this repurposing of white blood cells in flowing blood is more effective than directly targeting the cancer cells with liposomes or soluble protein,” say the authors.

In the laboratory, King and his colleagues tested this concept’s efficacy. When treating cancer cells with the proteins in saline, they found a 60 percent success rate in killing the cancer cells. In normal laboratory conditions, the saline lacks white blood cells to serve as a carrier for the adhesive and killer proteins. Once the proteins were added to flowing blood, which models forces, mixing and other human-body conditions, however, the success rate in killing the cancer cells jumped to nearly 100 percent.

In addition to King, the paper’s researchers include first author Michael Mitchell, a Cornell doctoral candidate in the field of biomedical engineering; Elizabeth C. Wayne, a Cornell doctoral student in the field of biomedical engineering; Kuldeepsinh Rana, a Cornell Ph.D. ’11; and Chris Schaffer, associate professor in biomedical engineering. The National Cancer Institute (Physical Sciences-Oncology program) of the National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, Md. funded the research through Cornell’s Center for the Microenvironment and Metastasis.

Metastasis is the spread of a cancer cells to other parts of the body. Surgery and radiation are effective at treating primary tumors, but difficulty in detecting metastatic cancer cells has made treatment of the spreading cancer problematic, say the scientists.

The Plundering of NASA: an Expose' by R. D. Boozer (Copyright 2013) is an exhaustive report on how pork barrel politics has diverted vital NASA funding away from cutting edge technological research into building, to borrow a term from space science writer, John Stickland, "a rocket to nowhere." R. D. "Rick" Boozer is an astrophysicist who in addition to writing books and articles, hosts a blog called Astro Maven and a website called Singularity Scientific. Both are dedicated to putting forth the message that science can be fun.

This is reminiscent of a similar proposal for garbage trucks - electric motors and a small gas turbine to top up the batteries. Here we have a (very efficient) Sterling motor producing the electricity...

The aging literature is replete with treatments that could prolong lifespan by 20-40%, at least in lab animals. Interventions such as caloric restriction, rapamycin and metformin have been studied for decades for their anti-aging capacity. Although there is still some discrepancy in their effectiveness in primates, the biomedical community agrees that they’re promising.

What’s more, new interventions keep coming out. In the past two years, multiple scientific teams demonstrated the rejuvenating powers of young blood. Just last week, a study published in the esteemed journal Nature found that eliminating senescent cells in aged mice boosted their lifespan by a hefty 30%.

A new material structure developed at MIT generates steam by soaking up the sun. The structure — a layer of graphite flakes and an underlying carbon foam — is a porous, insulating material structure that floats on water. When sunlight hits the structure’s surface, it creates a hotspot in the graphite, drawing water up through the material’s pores, where it evaporates as steam. The brighter the light, the more steam is generated.

The new material is able to convert 85 percent of incoming solar energy into steam — a significant improvement over recent approaches to solar-powered steam generation. What’s more, the setup loses very little heat in the process, and can produce steam at relatively low solar intensity. This would mean that, if scaled up, the setup would likely not require complex, costly systems to highly concentrate sunlight.

Hadi Ghasemi, a postdoc in MIT’s Department of Mechanical Engineering, says the spongelike structure can be made from relatively inexpensive materials — a particular advantage for a variety of compact, steam-powered applications.

“Steam is important for desalination, hygiene systems, and sterilization,” says Ghasemi, who led the development of the structure. “Especially in remote areas where the sun is the only source of energy, if you can generate steam with solar energy, it would be very useful.”

Ghasemi and mechanical engineering department head Gang Chen, along with five others at MIT, report on the details of the new steam-generating structure in the journal Nature Communications.

Today, solar-powered steam generation involves vast fields of mirrors or lenses that concentrate incoming sunlight, heating large volumes of liquid to high enough temperatures to produce steam. However, these complex systems can experience significant heat loss, leading to inefficient steam generation.

Recently, scientists have explored ways to improve the efficiency of solar-thermal harvesting by developing new solar receivers and by working with nanofluids. The latter approach involves mixing water with nanoparticles that heat up quickly when exposed to sunlight, vaporizing the surrounding water molecules as steam. But initiating this reaction requires very intense solar energy — about 1,000 times that of an average sunny day.

By contrast, the MIT approach generates steam at a solar intensity about 10 times that of a sunny day — the lowest optical concentration reported thus far. The implication, the researchers say, is that steam-generating applications can function with lower sunlight concentration and less-expensive tracking systems.

Planarian flatworms are one of nature's little wonders. Although their 'cross-eyed' appearance is endearing, their real claim to fame comes from their regenerative ability. Split a planarian down the middle and you'll soon have two cross-eyed critters staring back at you; cut one up and each piece will regenerate an entire flatworm. How do they pull of such an incredible feat? In 2011, researchers discovered that planarian regeneration depends on the activity of stem cells ('neoblasts') distributed throughout the flatworm's body, but important questions about the process have remained unanswered. Are certain stem cells responsible for each organ? What activates the stem cells when regeneration is needed? An enterprising team of scientists at the Stowers Institute for Medical Research has brought us closer to answering these questions by developing a new technique to study planarian regeneration and using it to discover some of they genes involved.

Regeneration isn't a uniquely planarian trait; starfish are well-known for growing back lost body parts, and even humans can regenerate to some extent (think of a wound healing). Planarians certainly excel at it, though; a flatworm can recover from being cut up into a staggering 279 tiny pieces, each of which regenerates into a new worm! Here's a fun conundrum for those inclined to such things: which worm, if any, can claim to be the 'original worm'? What if it were only two pieces instead of over 200? Would it make a difference if the two pieces were different sizes?

Using this technique, which they termed 'chemical amputation', the team induced lesions in planaria and investigated which genes were activated over the course of the regeneration process. The pharynx lacks neoblasts, but cells near the wound quickly start dividing and regenerate the amputated organ. To identify genes which were interesting, the team combined two screening approaches. First, a microarray picked out genes which were active during regeneration, providing a list of 356 candidates. Next, the team used RNAi to block the activity of each gene in amputated flatworms and checked whether the pharynx still regenerated. This narrowed the list down to twenty genes, which the team divided into different sets. Some genes affected stem cells in general, other affected feeding behaviour, and a handful directly affected the development of the pharynx. Of these, the transcription factor FoxA seemed to play the greatest role in regenerating the pharynx.

The team next looked at how regeneration went wrong in planaria with FoxA knocked down. They found that stem cells still migrated to the wound site and multiplied there, but the resulting outgrowth failed to become a pharynx. They also tried amputating the tails or heads of FoxA knock-downs, which then successfully regenerated. "Targeting FoxA completely blocked pharynx regeneration but had no effect on the regeneration of other organs," said Adler in a press release. “Currently, we think that FoxA triggers a cascade of gene expression that drives stem cells to produce all of the different cells of the pharynx, including muscle, neurons, and epithelial cells.” FoxA is known to play a role in specifying the pharynx in the sea anemone and in the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans, as well regulating the development of the intestine in vertebrates, so it makes sense that it's a central player in pharynx regeneration in planaria. More importantly, its identification can serve as a wedge to pry apart the details of regeneration; coupled with the other genes picked up in this study, it offers an exciting opportunity to expand our understanding of this important process.

There have been multiple plagues throughout history around the world, but none have been so deadly as the Black Death, which killed an estimated one in every four Europeans, and so exerted very strong selection. The Black Death didn’t just wipe out millions of Europeans during the 14th century. It left a mark on the human genome, favoring those who carried certain immune system genes, according to a new study. Those changes may help explain why Europeans respond differently from other people to some diseases and have different susceptibilities to autoimmune disorders.

Geneticists know that human populations evolve in the face of disease. Certain versions of our genes help us fight infections better than others, and people who carry those genes tend to have more children than those who don’t. So the beneficial genetic versions persist, while other versions tend to disappear as those carrying them die. This weeding-out of all but the best genes is called positive selection. But researchers have trouble pinpointing positively selected genes in humans, as many genes vary from one individual to the next.

Genetically, the Rroma gypsies in Romania are still quite similar to the northwestern Indians, even though they have lived side by side with the Romanians for a millennium, the team found. But there were 20 genes in the Rroma and the Romanians that had changes that were not seen in the Indians’ versions of those genes, Netea and his colleagues report online today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. These genes “were positively selected for in the Romanians and in the gypsies but not in the Indians,” Netea explains. “It’s a very strong signal.”

Those genes included one for skin pigmentation, one involved in inflammation, and one associated with susceptibility to autoimmune diseases such as rheumatoid arthritis. But the ones Netea and Bertranpetit were most excited about were a cluster of three immune system genes found on chromosome 4. These genes code for toll-like receptors, proteins which latch on to harmful bacteria in the body and launch a defensive response. “We knew they must be important for host defense,” Netea says.

What events in history might have favored these versions of the genes in gypsies and Romanians, but not in Indians? Netea and his colleagues tested the ability of the toll-like receptors to react to Yersinia pestis, the bacterium that caused the Black Death. They found that the strength of the immune response varied depending on the exact sequence of the toll-like receptor genes.

Netea and Bertranpetit propose that the Rroma and European Romanians came to have the same versions of these immune system genes because of the evolutionary pressure exerted by Y. pestis. Other Europeans, whose ancestors also faced and survived the Black Death, carried similar changes in the toll-like receptor genes. But people from China and Africa—two other places the Black Death did not reach—did not have these changes. The similarities in the other genes were likely caused by other conditions experienced by Rroma and Europeans, but not Indians.

Between 2005 and 2011, nearly half of all new drug formulations in the US were approved without companies having to demonstrate a tangible benefit, such as relieving disease symptoms, extending life, or improving someone’s ability to go about normal activities.

What patients really want is evidence that the drug they are taking will actually improve their condition. But the FDA, the American drug regulator, doesn’t routinely consider this for new molecular entities (NMEs) – drugs that have innovative chemical structures that have never been marketed before.

The findings come in a new paper by Nicholas Downing of Yale University and colleagues, part of a series on the drug approval process published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), that found there was wide variation in the quality of evidence considered by the FDA. They also found that nearly two out of five drugs approved by the FDA was brought to market after a single pivotal trial.

A second paper in the series documented the lack of data required by the FDA when it considers approvals for medical devices – the study found that only 14% of high-risk medical devices, such as pacemakers and other cardiovascular implants, were assessed in one randomised control trial.

Both studies strongly suggest that the FDA is approving products that may not have accurate risk-benefit profiles, which could place patients at risk.

Since the 1960s, the total number of drugs approved has been falling on average, according to data collated by The Conversation. This is happening at the same time as the cost of research and development is going up. In another study in the JAMA series, six FDA scientists looked at the reasons why approvals for drugs might be delayed or denied. According to the paper, between 2000 and 2012 a half of NMEs were approved when first submitted to the agency and nearly 75% were ultimately approved. Some of the reasons why new compounds failed to earn FDA approval included inadequate performance and problems with doses.

It’s a hugely important paper because information from the FDA on why drugs aren’t approved is limited, due to data sharing issues despite recommendations from its own transparency taskforce.

As Marcia Angell, former editor of the New England Journal of Medicine, has observed, “there is growing evidence that … [the FDA] has become the servant of the industry it regulates.”

Taken together, the articles support calls for the FDA to be more robust in the surveillance of marketed drugs and medical products. Simply stated, we need to know if the products we are using actually work. As the Downing study shows, the FDA’s pre-market review process isn’t clear on this and the public remain none the wiser,

In Singapore, the challenge of feeding a growing population is pushing the concept of urban farming to new heights. A super-efficient vertical farming system is producing greens for 5 million residents.

"Can we supply enough food for everyone on the planet?" is a question plaguing leaders around the world. In Singapore SkyGreen offers one example of how this might be possible, "not just technically, but economically". By increasing their food security while reducing the impact of food production on global climate change, SkyGreen is 10 times more productive per square foot than conventional farming.

We have seen huge advancements in 3D printing. We’ve even seen oversized wrenches printed that measure 1.2 meters in length. Now, we can print an entire 2,500 sqft house in 20 hours.

"In manufacturing we use a process called CAD/CAM (computer-aided design / computer-aided manufacturing). 3D models are designed on a computer and then manufactured using computer controlled Machines or 3D printers."

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